Ber Borochov

“ In the process the Hebraists make an ugly laughingstock of themselves, turning the people’s hearts from the very language before which the Hebraists bow. The masses do not grasp fine distinctions. Even those most conscious are only human and not strangers to anger and grief. When the Hebraists holler in the name of Hebrew it is natural for their audience to assume that they have the sanction of loshn kodesh to speak its name. We must therefore protest that the Hebraists dig a grave for Hebrew with their own hands, through their deeds and calumnies. ”

“ The Jewish Labor movement has been splintered into four distinct Jewish socialist parties. Foremost, claiming to be the "sole champion," (of the Jewish workers) is the Bund. The Bund has long made its reputation on spiritual platitudes, boorishness, irresponsibility and a total inability for rational thought. But it acted like a Mr. Moneybags, a noveau riche, dispensing favors through its kulak, intimidating all the Jewish artisans and petty bourgeoisie. ”

“ It is hard to say which is the more amazing in our optimists: the naiveté of their enthusiasm or the dullness of their perception. They continue to sing hymns of praise to progress at a time when "cultured" England is cruelly grabbing from the Boers their last possessions–to the thunder of cannon and the applause of all classes of the English people; when "cultured" America is guilty of wanton despoliation of the Negroes; when Germany is threatening the entire world with its arrogant militarism; when the strong nations are prepared to trample one another for a piece of land in Turkey or China ”

“ The financier, the money capitalist, whose clutches are on the whole course of the modern economy, has even less contact with the domestic market than has the great industrialist.
The great bourgeoisie, therefore, does not conduct a domestic national policy. It dreams of the universal might of its national capital. It seeks to crowd all "foreign" capital out of the world-market, so that its own profits may be the greater. ”

“ It is absurd to assert that the Jewish worker cannot be "proletarianized." His being a worker is evident of the fact that he ceased to be an "owner," that he has placed his labor-power on the market, and has ipso facto become a member of the proletariat. The proposition, therefore, that Jewish workers cannot achieve their own proletarianization becomes an even greater absurdity when it comes from a Jewish Socialist Labor Party. ”

“ At the beginning of a national and cultural renaissance–during the genesis of national culture–there is chaos. The folk language is divided into countless dialects. People of different localities speak differently and everybody writes as he pleases, each writer fashioning his own words according to his own understanding. Only philology can bring an end to this havoc. Philology ascertains the root of each word and traces its history and the development of its meaning. Science thus allows general and clear principles to replace personal whims and inventions. ”

“ The assimilation of foreigners is actually in itself a most unpleasant business, and hence also undesirable. New people mean new candidates for benefits from the accumulated public assets, new hands hungrily stretched out for a share of the common loaf of bread. In order for a nation to desire the assimilation of another social group, it must first see in it something so valuable and attractive as to make it worthwhile despite all the inconvenience of including new partners in the distribution of the assets. ”

“ It is always harmful to obscure the class or national consciousness of a given group, irrespective of whether this is a result of a class or national demagogy. Whether it is class or national interests which are being obscured, or whether it is the real conditions of production or the relations of production which are being falsely interpreted, is immaterial, since the one attempt as well as the other is reactionary. ”

“ If we use the farmer as an illustration, there can be no doubt that his work in producing a crop is both difficult and important; nevertheless, the part played by the soil in the production of the crop is greater than that of the human labor involved. The farmer tills, fertilizes, plows, sows, and in the end harvests; but ultimately it is nature that provides the most important factors in the production of the crop. On the other hand, the human labor involved in the production of a garment far exceeds the contributions of nature. The sheep and wool are the products of nature ”

“ At all points enroute, through Austria, Germany, France, England, and Holland, he came in contact with comrades from all countries, weaving a spiritual thread between east and west. In that way the seed of revolutionary thought was carried to the four corners of the world. The flow of migration spread the Jewish labor movement everywhere. ”

“ Amidst today’s nationalist passions each class-conscious worker and every socialist must pose this question: How do the two great ideas of liberation–social liberation of laboring humanity and national liberation of oppressed peoples–relate to each other? This is not the place to broach the full breadth of this matter. We simply wish to illustrate it through the concrete instance of the Jewish Labor movement. ”

“ But the peoples who have never needed us and those who have ceased to need us will try–as we now see–to drive us away by means of restrictive laws or, if humane feelings rule out legal discrimination, will destroy us by a persistent boycott; at best, competition will put an end to the Jews. For even where the Jews are numerous, only a few can become big capitalists while the rest, the middle and lower middle classes, cannot withstand the competition of the local bourgeoisie, whose strength lies in its land and its blood-ties with the rest of the population. ”

“ The methods of philology will enrich the language by enabling the nation to become acquainted with its literary past and to learn to benefit from its latent wealth. But his is a task that individuals cannot take upon themselves. Individuals can work on single branches, since it is they who have the initiative. But only a societal institution can organize the work of philology in its entire breadth. Only when we have united our people’s strength, when there is an authoritative national organization for philological purposes, will Yiddish philology be able to befittingly fulfill its aims. ”

“ All propaganda and every moment, which is rooted in the character of the conditions of production of a given society, is either national or nationalistic. Whenever it attempts to blunt the class and civic consciousness of the members of that society, and whenever it ignores the class structure and the antagonism between the interests of the classes, it is nationalistic. If, however, it does not obscure the class structure of the society, it is national. ”

“ But a Jewish socialist not wishing to court favor with his foes, a person who can think straight and wants to fight hard, will run from the Bund as if from a wilderness. And he will be welcomed by the Poale Zion with open arms. But then the Poale Zionists were tearing each other up over conflicting theories. The spiritual father of Socialist Zionism, Dr. Nachman Syrkin, only made his amazing discovery a year after the sanctimonious Bund was ushered into life. Yet no one in Russia had an inkling of his new theorems. It was my lot to stumble upon the discovery of Socialist Zionism on my own. ”

“ To be sure, no nation’s economic life is founded on land alone. All economic life consists of both elements, land and labor. Indeed, the development of industry is invariably accompanied by an increase in the element of human labor, and a proportional decrease in the elements of nature in production. Although the elements of soil and nature are decreasing in the economic life of other peoples, they are almost absent from Jewish production which is built exclusively on human labor. ”

“ Increasing recognition of the freedom and rights of the individual proves that the nature of social relations in our time is making the exploitation of someone else’s toil by compulsion quite superfluous and even harmful. Society now requires only free workers, and these are available everywhere and in whatever quantity required, i.e. there is no longer need of the functions of the foreigner. Hence, if even today we witness the deliberate assimilation of a social group, it can only be fore the sake of its wealth. ”

“ Those who berate nationalism in general as something obsolete and reactionary, as a traditional thing, are remarkably shallow and ignorant. Nationalism is a product of the bourgeois society — it was born simultaneously with it, its reign is as old as that of the bourgeois society, and it must be reckoned with as much as any other phenomenon of bourgeois society. Speaking from the proletarian standpoint, we must therefore say that the proletariat is directly concerned with nationalism, with the national wealth, and with the territory. ”

“ When these groups have attained a high degree of development, have freed themselves from the narrow framework of traditionalism, then their nationalism accordingly acquires a pure and genuine character. The process of liberation is essentially not nationalistic, but national. And among the progressive elements of an oppressed nation there develops a genuine nationalism. It does not dream of preserving its traditions; it does not exaggerate their importance; it is not deluded by the sham of national unity; it has a clear comprehension of the class-character of society ”

“ Prostitution has made its appearance among us. Poverty has reached unparalleled proportions. The slightest economic tremor ejects us by the thousands from our petty bourgeoisie position into the arms of the lumplenproletariat, into the desperate poverty of the sans-culottes. Furthermore, most of the Jews are concentrated in countries where capitalism did not develop organically and steadily, but suddenly swept the whole economy into its whirling vortex: Russia, Galicia, and Rumania were sucked into the process of industrial capitalism by the tempest of inevitability. ”

“ Let us take a small community, such as the Jews of Morocco. There are 300,000 Jews there, descendents of the exiles of Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the stock which gave to Judaism generations of distinguished personalities–scholars, poets, philosophers, and rabbis. A group of such superior descent deserves particular attention. But if the achievements of your progress must be attained by rivers of blood, by the degradation and torture of those Jews, is not the price of this boundlessly cruel idol of yours too high? ”

“ Unemployment is not a very pleasant thing for him. Even Marx recognized the fact that there exists a degree of competition among workers for the place of work when he said, "The great industry masses together in a single place a crowd of people unknown to each other. Competition divides their interests... Thus competition has always a double end, that of eliminating competition among themselves while enabling them to make a general competition against the capitalist," (The Poverty of Philosophy) . ”